Given his long track record of lawsuits, not to mention his recent indictment and arrest, you’d think Donald Trump would be pretty good at court by now. But you would be wrong. Just one day into E. Jean Carroll’s civil trial — surrounding Carroll’s claims that Trump raped her in the dressing room of Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s — and the judge has already been forced to reprimand the former president. Who opted to forgo even showing up to the trial… as he didn’t want to cause any traffic jams?!
Still, as Raw Story reports, Trump’s looming presence is certainly being felt in the courtroom — in part because of what he’s doing outside the courtroom. Shortly before Carroll was set to begin testifying, Trump began attacking her on TRUTH Social. First there was this:
The E. Jean Carroll case, Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, is a made up SCAM. Her lawyer is a political operative, financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist, only to get caught lying about that. Just look at her CNN interview before & after the commercial break – Like a different person. She said there was a dress, using the ol’ Monica Lewinsky “stuff”, then she didn’t want to produce it. The dress should be allowed to be part of the case. This is a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!
Then came essentially more of the same, about an hour later:
They got caught lying! The Miss Bergdorf Goodman case is financed by a big political donor that they tried to hide. Does anybody believe that I would take a then almost 60 year old woman that I didn’t know, from the front door of a very crowded department store, (with me being very well known, to put it mildly!), into a tiny dressing room, and …. her. She didn’t scream? There are no witnesses? Nobody saw this? She never made a police complaint? If I was seen there with a woman-BIG PRESS. SCAM!
Given the immediate nature of social media, and that such messages could be considered a form of witness intimidation, Carroll’s lawyer didn’t hesitate to bring up Trump’s posts essentially as he was sharing them to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who deemed them “entirely inappropriate.”
Joe Tacopina, Trump’s lawyer, took the brunt of the reprimand and — already knowing that his client will do and say what he wants — told the judge that he’d “try to address that with my client” and ask him to stop speaking about the case publicly.
“Well, I hope you’re more successful,” the judge replied, seemingly unconvinced that a talking-to would do much to dissuade Trump from saying whatever thought pops into his orange-tinged brain. Kaplan did warn Tacopina that his client “may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability … And I think you know what I mean.”
For the moment, Trump has gone back to the well for his most recent TRUTH Social posts, including sharing a video about Hunter Biden’s laptop and another about the rigged 2020 presidential election. Whether or not he will be able to resist posting about the trial again, however, remains to be seen.
(Via Raw Story)